Did you have previous prgramming experience before starting college? If, so how much did it help? Would you have gotten the degree without the previous experience?

1) Yes, I started programming in BASIC just three months before my 6th birthday, over thirty years ago. That is very atypical.

2) Yes, when I attended school I was able to skip (test out) of nearly 18 months worth of classes, and I was able to study interesting stuff and easily slide over the stuff I already knew.

3) Most people start into their CS degree without any prior experience. What matters is that you have the right mindset and actually work hard at the subject. You get out of your education whatever you put in to it. I could have chosen to slack off and still earn my degree, but I would have gotten almost nothing out of those years. Instead I chose to work hard and seriously study the topics I wanted, and put it a reasonable effort on the topics I found distasteful.

Relative to the real work force, education is fairly easy. It doesn't take much effort to master the material and earn high grades (and scholarships). Most people don't learn this fact until after they finish school.

1. None except basic html and light use of mysql
2. It would have. I probably could have picked up another major with time saved. Math was probably equally important, but my degree was applied math and computer science, not just CS.
3. I did.

frob has most of the reasons I'd cover, so I'll refrain from adding anything other than the above.

I haven't finished my degree yet but:

1. Yes, I started programming (in Pascal) when I was 11.

2. It helps me considerably in computer science and math (especially discrete math) classes. There are a lot of concepts I already know that others need time to assimilate. It gives me a lot of free to time to get ahead (or slack off )

3. I think I wouldn't be in this course at all without the previous experience - after all, you need some sort of interest in the subject - but theoretically speaking, I suppose yes. Clearly people without prior experience are getting CS degrees, so why shouldn't I be able to?

Yes tons of experience programming on my own before studying CS. Not only has it helped me, it made the curriculum seem a little boring (not hard enough). To be honest if you have lots of experience going in its best to double up on something like mathematics.

1) Some. I dabbled in basic for a few years before college.

2) Hard to say. I found the programming parts of my CS degree pretty easy.

3) Probably. The harder parts were the maths, logic and language theory classes.

I got my degree from Carnegie Mellon, which is a bit more discrete math and theory oriented than a lot of other CS programs, at least from what I hear. I'd been programming since pretty much forever before I started and I had pretty good experience with math too. The programming experience helped, but not overwhelmingly so. I know people who had never programmed before who managed to do fine, although they definitely had to do a bit more work. I think I'd have survived without previous programming experience; probably less so without previous math experience (most of the people I know who stopped doing computer science seemingly did so because of the math, not the programming, although I don't have enough data points to say that that's necessarily true in general).

1) Yes, I had studied C and JavaScript before starting college in the distant future, the year 2000.

2) Considering there was almost no real programming instruction at my university, but more of a sink-or-swim attitude towards being able to apply the theory we learned into valid syntax, I would say it helped immensely. I just wasn't under the same amount of stress as my fellow students who had not started early, so I think I learned a lot of the theoretical stuff easier, knowing that implementation would not be an issue for me.

3) I probably wouldn't have gone into CS at all, probably would have done either Fine Art or some other form of Applied Mathematics instead. I went into CS thinking I'd do 3D programming, thinking it'd be a reasonable amalgamation of those two ideas. WRONG ON BOTH ACCOUNTS!

• I'd been programming extensively for around 5 years, and had a solid mathematics background as well.
• It definitely helped - most CS programs place very little emphasis on teaching programming, and you are expected to pick that up on the side.
• If I hadn't started with a programming background, I might have had to actually study.

• When I started reading my degree at age 20, I already had 12 years experience in programming.
  (In GWBASIC, then QB, VB4 and VB6... -I think a lot of CS students start due to personal interest. Here in DK at least, kids have all the surplus to undertake long educations based on their hobbies, less on what pays off in the end.)
• It did help. I understood some things better, and managed to teach programming to other students during team work.
• - Would I've picked(started studying) the degree at all?
  I don't think I would've gained the same level of interest. Then it would've been due to playing computer games, or messing with electronics.
  - Would I have gotten the degree after picking the degree?
  Yes, -maybe I would even have been less arrogant and achieved higher grades.